Science proves that ‘baby talk’ is a universal language

Friday, 13 October 2017, 07:29:23 AM. Mothers across the globe subconsciously change the timbre of their voice when they talk to their baby to help them learn, a new study found. Regardless of the language spoken, all mothers when they…

Mothers across the globe subconsciously change the timbre of their voice when they talk to their baby to help them learn, a new study found.

Regardless of the language spoken, all mothers when they talk to their infants use a universal “motherese” or “baby talk” — an exaggerated and somewhat musical form of speech.

While it may sound silly to adults, studies showed it plays an important role in language learning, engaging infants’ emotions and highlighting the structure in language, to help babies decode the puzzle of syllables and sentences.

Now Princeton University researchers found another unique feature of the way mothers talk to their babies in that they shift the timbre of their voice in a rather specific way.

This shift in timbre is so the newborn can recognize their mother and pay attention to her.

And the same could be true of doting fathers.

Postdoctoral research associate Elise Piazza with the Princeton Neuroscience Institute said this was “a new cue that mothers implicitly use to support babies’ language learning.”

“We found for the first time that mothers shift their vocal timbre.”

“Timbre is best defined as the unique quality of a sound.”

“Barry White’s silky voice sounds different from Tom Waits’ gravelly one — even if they’re both singing the same note.”

“We use timbre, the tone color or unique quality of a sound, all the time to distinguish people, animals, and instruments.”

“We found that mothers alter this basic quality of their voices when speaking to infants, and they do so in a highly consistent way across many diverse languages.”

They were recorded while they played with and read to their seven to 12-month-old infants and when they spoke to another adult.

These shifts in timbre suggested there was a universal form of communication with infants.

And the differences are strong enough to be reliably picked out by a machine learning algorithm.

Future research will explore how the timbre shift helps infants in learning.

The researchers suspecting the unique timbre fingerprint could help babies learn to differentiate and direct their attention to their mother’s voice from the time they are born.

While baby talk is not a new discovery, professor of psychology Jenny Saffran at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the study explained: “We’ve known for a long time that adults change the way they speak when they are addressing babies”

“They speak more slowly, use shorter sentences, talk at a higher pitch and swoop their pitch up and down more often than when they are speaking to other adults.”

“This is the first study to ask whether mothers also change the timbre of their voice, manipulating the kinds of features that differentiate musical instruments from one another.”

“This is fascinating because clearly speakers are not aware of changing their timbre, and this new study shows that it is a highly reliable feature of the way we speak to babies.”

The vocal fingerprints technique for quantifying timbre could also open doors to other types of speech analysis, noted Piazza.

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